One Fine Show: “Anselm Kiefer, Becoming the Sea” at the Saint Louis Art Museum

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1600667" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/1.-Missouri-Mississippi.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="An image of Anselm Kiefer’s large mixed-media painting Missouri, Mississippi (2024), showing a map-like upper panel with a reclining female figure embedded in river forms and a lower panel depicting a dark dam structure rising above turbulent green water.” width=”970″ height=”1084″ data-caption=’Anselm Kiefer, <em>Missouri, Mississippi</em>, 2024. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis and collage of canvas on canvas; 30 feet 10 1/16 inches x 27 feet 6 11/16 inches; collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian, 2025.310. <span class=”media-credit”>© Anselm Kiefer, Photo: Nina Slavcheva</span>’>

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

The best exhibition of work by Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) that I’ve seen so far was held at the Doge’s Palace in Venice in 2022. This grandiose venue of political intrigue turned out to be the perfect place for the German artist’s large-scale scenes of luxurious destruction. The gilded furnishings always lead so naturally to the Bridge of Sighs and the adjacent prison. Even the color scheme of burnt ochre and grey went well with the palace’s rich wood and often literal darkness.

It would be hard to think of many places more different from Venice than Saint Louis, yet the Saint Louis Art Museum, which just opened “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea,” is not as unlikely a venue for a show of the artist as you might think. What the two cities have in common is water, which is crucial to Kiefer’s tide pool worlds. In 1991, the artist journeyed up the Mississippi during a visit to St. Louis, a formative trip that evoked the Rhine of his childhood. The exhibition features 40 works from the 1970s through to the present, with more than 20 works made in the last five years and five monumental site-specific paintings.

One of these new works, Missouri, Mississippi (2024), commemorates that trip from 1991. It is gigantic like all of them, 30 feet by 27 feet. Dominating the scene is the end of the journey when, in a small boat, the artist came upon the Melvin Price Lock and Dam in Alton, Illinois. Waves crash against the giant edifice, which apparently has a series of mysterious airy structures atop it like a series of strange identical Parthenons, but this is only the bottom half of the painting. In the top we see the water swirling around a woman’s body. She’s some kind of tortured river goddess or maybe just dead.

Being dwarfed by that giant dam in 1991 might have inspired Die Orden der Nacht (The Orders of the Night) (1996), which sees the artist in the Savasana yoga pose, aka corpse pose, under giant black sunflowers that seem to absorb the light. Die Milchstraße (The Milky Way) (1985-87), from before this trip, would seem to represent his normal instincts, which are to make a giant ruined battlefield and then imbue it with some mythology. Here the stars are being siphoned down into the ditch via thin metal tubes. Maginot (1982-2013) feels in this vein.

Probing the effect that the Mississippi had on him, we should look at the two works dedicated to beat poet Gregory Corso, whose lines about eternal life were the basis for the title of this exhibition. Becoming the ocean, for Gregory Corso (2024), which still has a dry and puckered texture, suggests the ocean is still a battlefield. I do like that one of the materials is “sediment of electrolysis.” It’s possible that this trip up the Mississippi was where the artist first came to configure some kind of optimism into his intensely postwar landscapes. Für Gregory Corso (2024) sees a contented woman in the night sky above the waves, apparently the spirit that lives on amid all this desolation.

“Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea” is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum through January 25, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Chiharu Shiota Weaves Historical Memory, Body and Belonging in “Two Home Countries”